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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 66.69.219.9 (talk) at 04:09, 15 September 2006 ("extreme, militant" most apropos; a "fundamentalist" would take the Qur'an literally and adhere to it). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaida (Template:ArB, Template:ArTranslit; "the foundation", "the base" or "the database") is an armed Sunni lsamist organization with the stated objective of eliminating foreign influence in Muslim countries. The most prominent members of the group are adherents of Wahabism, an extreme, militant sect of Islam. While Osama bin Laden is generally recognized as the group's leader, the group's operations are not centralized, and many independent and collaborative cells exist in multiple countries linked by a common cause.

Al-Qaeda has been linked to multiple acts of terrorism against U.S. interests, but is best known for the September 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and The Pentagon. In response, the United States launched a war against Afghanistan, whose government was providing safe haven to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda members. Due to its history, the group is officially designated as a terrorist organization in the United States, [1] the United Kingdom, [2] Canada, [3] and Australia [4].

Organization structure and membership

The chain of command

Though the current structure of al-Qaeda is unknown, information mostly acquired from the defector Jamal al-Fadl provided American authorities with a rough picture of how the group was organized. While the veracity of the information provided by al-Fadl and the motivation for his cooperation are both disputed, American authorities base much of their current knowledge of al-Qaeda on his testimony.

Bin Laden is the emir and Senior Operations Chief of al-Qaeda (although originally this role may have been filled by Abu Ayoub al-Iraqi), advised by a shura council, which consists of senior al-Qaeda members, estimated by Western officials at about twenty to thirty people. Ayman al-Zawahiri is al-Qaeda's Deputy Operations Chief and Abu Ayyub al-Masri is possibly the Senior Leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

  • The Military committee is responsible for training, weapons acquisition, and planning attacks.
  • The Money/Business committee runs business operations. The travel office provides air tickets and false passports. The payroll office pays al-Qaeda members, and the Management office oversees money-making businesses. In the US 911 Commission Report it is estimated that al-Qaeda requires 30,000,000 USD / year to conduct its operation.
  • The Law committee reviews Islamic law and decides if particular courses of action conform to the law.
  • The Islamic study/fatwah committee issues religious edicts, such as an edict in 1998 telling Muslims to kill Americans.
  • In the late 1990s there was a publicly known Media committee, which ran the now-defunct newspaper Nashrat al Akhbar (Newscast) and did public relations. It is currently assumed that media operations are now outsourced to internally redundant parts of the organization.

Political revolt or structured paramilitary organization: unknown

Some organizational specialists have said that al-Qaeda's network structure, as opposed to a hierarchical structure is its primary strength. The decentralized structure enables al-Qaeda to have a worldwide distributed base while retaining a relatively small core. While an estimated 100,000 Islamist militants are said to have received instruction in al-Qaeda camps since its inception, the group is believed to retain only a small number of militants under direct orders. Estimates seldom peg its manpower higher than 20,000 world wide.

For its most complex operations (such as the 9/11 attacks on the US) all participants, planning and funding are believed to have been directly provided by the core al-Qaeda organization. But in many attacks around the world where there appears to be an al-Qaeda connection, its precise role has been less easy to define. Rather than handling these operations from conception to delivery, al-Qaeda often appears to act as an international financial and logistical support-network, channeling income obtained from a network of fund-raising activities to provide training capital and coordination for local radical groups. In many cases it is these local groups, only loosely affiliated to core al-Qaeda, which actually undertake the attacks.

Australian tourists and interests have been targeted in a series of devastating annual attacks north of Australia in the southern islands of Indonesia, on the southern edge of southeast Asia. These attacks and plots have been attributed to Jemaah Islamiyah, al-Qaeda's affiliate in the region. The 2002 Bali bombing, and subsequently the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, the 2004 Jakarta embassy bombing and the 2005 Bali bombings provide some insight into al-Qaeda's decentralized method of operations: the attacks showed far greater coordination and effectiveness than might historically have been expected from regional militant networks. But police investigations and subsequent trials showed that while al-Qaeda was believed to have provided expertise and coordination, much of the planning and all the personnel who undertook the attacks came from local radical Islamist groups.

Al-Qaeda has been known to establish and foster new groups to further the radical Islamic interest in local conflicts. Indeed the Taliban might be deemed to fall into this category, the roots of the organization formed from radicalized students from the bin Laden funded medressas of the Afghan refugee camps at the time of the Russian occupation.

Is al-Qaeda a global network or a small organization?

Al-Qaeda has no clear structure, and this permits debate as to how many members make up the organization, whether it is millions scattered across the globe, or whether it is even zero. According to the controversial BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, al-Qaeda is so weakly linked together that it is hard to say it exists apart from Osama bin Laden and a small clique of close associates. The lack of any significant numbers of convicted al-Qaeda members despite a large number of arrests on terrorism charges is cited by the documentary as a reason to doubt whether a widespread entity that meets the description of al-Qaeda exists at all. The extent and nature of al-Qaeda remains a topic of dispute.

The al-Qaeda name itself does not seem to have been used by bin Laden himself to apply to his organization until after the September 11 attacks. Previous attacks attributed to bin Laden and al-Qaeda were, at the time, claimed by organizations under a variety of names. Bin Laden himself has since attributed the al-Qaeda name to the MAK base in Pakistan, dating from the Afghan war days. Daniel Benjamin in "The Age of Sacred Terror" cites an incident in the early 1990s where a document titled "The Foundation", Arabic "Al-Qa'eda", was found on an associate of Ramzi Youssef [5]. Fawaz A. Gerges writes that "Although in 1987 sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the spiritual father of the Afghan Arabs, planted the seeds of a trans-nationalist organization called 'Al Qaeda al-Sulbah' (the Solid Foundation), the bin Laden network saw the light much later, around the mid-1990s."[6]

Al-Qaeda members who carried out suicide bombings, hijackings and other terrorist attacks

Other alleged al-Qaeda leaders include:

Robin Cook Former Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons writing for the Guardian, spoke of Al Qaeda as an unintentional product of western interests (he died a month later):

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

Friday July 8 2005 article entitled: "The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means"

Cook's claims come partly from Pierre Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence (convicted in December 2001 by a secret French military court of passing classified documents). Excerpts from an April-June 2004 article by Bunel:

[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base". [1]

Activities

Incidents attributed to al-Qaeda

Note: al-Qaeda does not take credit for most of the following actions, resulting in ambiguity over how many attacks the group has actually conducted. Following the U.S. declaration of the War on Terrorism in 2001, the U.S. government has striven to highlight any connections between other militant groups and al-Qaeda. Some prefer to attribute to al-Qaedaism actions that might not be directly planned by al-Qaeda as a military headquarters, but which are inspired by its tenets and strategies.

Many terrorist attacks have been attributed to al-Qaeda.

The first militant attack that al-Qaeda allegedly carried out consisted of three bombings at hotels where American troops were staying in Aden, Yemen, on December 29, 1992. A Yemeni and an Austrian tourist died in one bombing.

There are disputed claims that al-Qaeda operatives assisted in the shooting down of U.S. helicopters and the killing of U.S. servicemen in Somalia in 1993. (see: Battle of Mogadishu)

Ramzi Yousef, who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (though probably not an al-Qaeda member at the time), and Khalid Sheik Mohammed planned Operation Bojinka, a plot to destroy airplanes in mid-Pacific flight using explosives. An apartment fire in Manila, Philippines exposed the plan before it could be carried out. Yousef was arrested, but Mohammed evaded capture until 2003.

Al-Qaeda is often listed as a suspect in two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996: the bombing at a U.S. military facility in Riyadh in November 1995, which killed two people from India and five Americans, and the June 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, which killed American military personnel in Dhahran. However, these attacks are usually ascribed to Hizbullah.

Al-Qaeda is believed to have conducted the bombings in August 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than 5,000 others.

In December 1999 and into 2000, al-Qaeda planned attacks against U.S. and Israeli tourists visiting Jordan for millennial celebrations; however, Jordanian authorities thwarted the planned attacks and put 28 suspects on trial. Part of this plot included the planned bombing of the Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California, but this plot was foiled when bomber Ahmed Ressam was caught at the US-Canadian border with explosives in the trunk of his car. Al-Qaeda also planned to attack the USS The Sullivans on January 3, 2000, but the effort failed due to too much weight being put on the small boat meant to bomb the ship.

Despite the setback with the USS The Sullivans, al-Qaeda succeeded in bombing a U.S. warship in October 2000 with the USS Cole bombing. German police foiled a plot to destroy a cathedral in Strasbourg, France in December 2000. See: Strasbourg cathedral bombing plot

The most destructive act ascribed to al-Qaeda was the series of attacks in the United States on September 11th, 2001.

Several attacks and attempted attacks since September 11, 2001 have been attributed to al-Qaeda. The first of which was the Paris embassy attack plot, which was foiled. The second of which involved the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who proclaimed himself a follower of Osama bin Laden, and who intended to destroy American Airlines Flight 63 and its passengers.

Other attacks ascribed to al-Qaeda and its affiliates:

Al-Qaeda has strong alliances with a number of other Islamic militant organizations including the Indonesian Islamic extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah. That group was responsible for the October 2002 Bali bombing, and the 2005 Bali bombings.

Although there have been no identified al-Qaeda attacks within the territory of the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks, attacks in the Middle East, Far East, Africa and Europe involving extensive casualties and turmoil have been attributed to organizations with affiliation to al-Qaeda. In the aftermath of several March 11, 2004 attacks on commuter trains in Madrid, a London newspaper reported receiving an email from a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, claiming responsibility and a videotape claiming responsibility was also found. The coincidence in timing of the attacks with elections in Spain inspired several politically-focused speculations on the real identity of the perpetrators, with many initially suspecting ETA. However the Interpol, the Spanish Government, police and judicial institutions agree that a fanatical Islamic cell is more likely to be the perpetrator. On April 3, 2004, in Leganes, Madrid, four Arab militants blew themselves up, killing one special assault police and wounding eleven.

It is also believed that al-Qaeda was involved in the 7 July 2005 London bombings, a series of attacks against mass transit in London which killed 52 people, not including the 4 suicide bombers (see Mohammad Sidique Khan).A statement from a previously unknown group, "The Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe", claimed responsibility; however, the authenticity of the statement and the group's connection to al-Qaeda have not been independently verified. The suspected perpetrators have not been definitively linked to al-Qaeda, although the contents of a video tape made by one of the bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan prior to his death and subsequently sent to Al Jazeera gives strong credence to an al-Qaeda connection. However, as with the Madrid attacks, it leaves significant doubts and questions unresolved. An apparently unconnected group attempted to duplicate the attack later that month, but their bombs failed to detonate.

Al-Qaeda is suspected of being involved with the 2005 Sharm el-Sheikh attacks in Egypt. On July 23, 2005, a series of suspected car bombs killed about 90 civilians and wounded over 150. The attack was the deadliest terrorist action in the history of Egypt.

Al-Qaeda is also suspected in the November 9, 2005 Amman, Jordan attacks in which three simultaneous bombings occurred at American owned hotels in Amman. The blast killed at least 57 people and injured 120 people. Most of the injured and killed were attending a wedding at the Radisson Hotel. The targeting of celebrating Muslim civilians cost al-Zarqawi (the man believed to have planned the attacks) greatly in Jordanian public opinion, and to a lesser extent in Arab public opinion as a whole.

Internet activities

In the wake of its evacuation from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and its successors have migrated online to escape detection in an atmosphere of increased international vigilance. As a result, the organization’s use of the Internet has grown more sophisticated, encompassing financing, recruitment, networking, mobilization, publicity, as well as information dissemination, gathering, and sharing. More than other paramilitary organizations, al-Qaeda has embraced the Web for these purposes. For example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda movement in Iraq regularly releases short videos glorifying the activity of jihadist suicide bombers. This growing range of multimedia content includes guerrilla training clips, stills of victims about to be murdered, testimonials of suicide bombers, and epic-themed videos with high production values that romanticize participation in jihad through stylized portraits of mosques and stirring musical scores. A website associated with al-Qaeda, for example, posted a video of captured American contractor Nick Berg being decapitated in Iraq. Other decapitation videos and pictures, including those of Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il, and Daniel Pearl, were first posted onto jihadist websites.

With the rise of “locally rooted, globally inspired” terrorists, counter-terrorism experts are currently studying how al-Qaeda is using the Internet – through websites, chat rooms, discussion forums, instant messaging, and so on – to inspire a worldwide network of support. The July 7, 2005 bombers, some of whom were well integrated into their local communities, are an example of such “globally inspired” terrorists, and they reportedly used the Internet to plan and coordinate, but the Internet’s precise role in the process of radicalization is not thoroughly understood. A group called the Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe has claimed responsibility for these London attacks on a militant Islamist website – another popular use of the Internet by terrorists seeking publicity.

The publicity opportunities offered by the Internet have been particularly exploited by al-Qaeda. In December 2004, for example, bin Laden released an audio message by posting it directly to a website, rather than sending a copy to al Jazeera as he had done in the past. Some analysts speculated that he did this to be certain it would be available unedited, out of fear that his criticism of Saudi Arabia — which was much more vehement than usual in this speech, lasting over an hour — might be edited out by al Jazeera editors worried about offending the touchy Saudi royal family.

In the past, Alneda.com and Jehad.net were perhaps the most significant of al-Qaeda websites. Alneda was initially taken down by an American, but the operators resisted by shifting the site to various servers and strategically changing content. The U.S. is currently attempting to extradite an information technology specialist, Babar Ahmad, from the UK, who is the creator of various English language al-Qaeda websites such as Azzam.com [10][11]. Ahmad's extradition is opposed by various British Muslim organizations, such as the Muslim Association of Britain.

Finally, at a mid-2005 presentation for U.S. government terrorism analysts, Dennis Pluchinsky called the global jihadist movement “Web-directed,” and former CIA deputy director John E. McLaughlin has also said it is now primarily driven today by “ideology and the Internet.”

Financial activities

Financial activities of al-Qaeda have been a major preoccupation of the US government following the September 11, 2001 attacks, leading for example to the discovery of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's tax evasion, for which his wife, Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, has been arrested in January 2006. It was also discovered by investigative reporter Denis Robert that funds from Osama bin Laden's Bahrain International Bank transited through illegal unpublished accounts of "clearing house" Clearstream, which has been qualified as a "bank of banks".

Israel

Despite bin Laden repeatedly referring to the Palestinian cause in his manifestos and interviews, some in the region villainize the organization for allegedly ignoring the Palestinian cause. There could be an endless list of reasons why al-Qaeda are seemingly inactive in the Palestinian territories; one theory is that al-Qaeda is unwilling to co-operate with the mainly Sh'ia groups such as Hezbollah who fund Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Another theory suggests that Palestinians don't wish to be stained further by the extremist ideology driving al-Qaeda followers, and prefer to conduct combat according to their own principles.

Al-Qaeda is suspected, however, to have planned and carried out two nearly simultaneous terror attacks against Israeli civilian targets in Mombasa, Kenya, on November 28, 2002. The one successful attack, a car-bomb placed in a resort hotel popular among Israeli tourists, claimed the lives of 15 people. The hotel bombing occurred 20 minutes after a failed attack on an airplane, when a terrorist fired an SA-7 MANPAD against an Israeli airliner carrying 261 passengers, which was taking off from the airport. The rocket narrowly missed its target and landed in an empty field.

Unclassified definition of al-Qaeda

Moazzam Begg, while held in extrajudicial detention in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, requested a definition of al-Qaeda, when he was presented with a "Summary of Evidence" against him, in preparation for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which accused him of being a member of al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or associated forces.[12] The unclassified definition offered to Begg by the US Department of Defense was:

"Al Qaeda is a radical Sunni Muslim umbrella organization established to recruit young Muslims into the Afghani Mujahideen and is aimed to establish Islamist states throughout the world, overthrow ‘un-Islamic regimes’, expel US soldiers and Western influence from the Gulf, and capture Jerusalem as a Muslim city."

Begg also asked for, and was not provided with, a definition of al-Qaeda's "associated forces".

Notes on naming

Al-Qaeda's name can also be transliterated as al-Qaida, al-Qa'ida, el-Qaida, or al Qaeda. In Arabic it is spelled القاعدة. Its Arabic pronunciation (IPA [æɛlˈqɒːʕıdæ]) can be approximated as IPA {{IPA[ɛl 'kɑː-idʌ]}}, which for American English speakers could be spelled "el-kAW-ee-deh," with the emphasized "AW" and "ee" clearly separated. However, English speakers more commonly pronounce it in a manner influenced by its spelling - IPA /ɑɫ 'kaɪdɘ/ for American English, /ɑːɫ 'kaɪdɘ/ in British English. Listen to the US pronunciation (RealPlayer).

Regarding the origin of the name al-Qaida, bin Laden himself stated in an October 2001 interview with Al Jazeera correspondent Tayseer Alouni that the name derived from the name of a training camp: "The name 'al Qaeda' was established a long time ago by mere chance. The late Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri established the training camps for our mujahedeen against Russia's terrorism. We used to call the training camp al Qaeda [meaning "the base" in English]. And the name stayed." [13]

An alternate theory, presented in the BBC film series "The Power of Nightmares" states that the name and concept of al-Qaeda was first used by the U.S. Department of Justice Department in January of 2001 at the New York City trial of four men accused of the 1998 United States embassy bombings in East Africa. By alleging Osama bin Laden's leadership of said organization, it became possible to charge bin Laden in absentia with the crime using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act also known as the RICO statutes. [14]

According to this theory, the name al-Qaeda was first provided to US prosecutors by Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese national and former employee of bin Laden, who after being caught stealing $110,000 from bin Laden, fled to the United States seeking protection from the U.S. Government. [15]

In 2005, Robin Cook, the late British member of Parliament and former foreign secretary, wrote that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the name of a computer file listing the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Soviets." [16] Dr. Sa'ad Al-Fagih, a surgeon at Peshawar (where the Mujahideen recruiting happened) further explained that the computer database (al-Qaeda) was necessary to fix problems associated with a lack of documentation about the fighters who were recruited. [17][18] The al-Qaida database was later developed to allow email communications between parties in different countries to coordinate their efforts.[19]

Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, wrote in an April-June 2004 article:

[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base". The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base". [20]

In April 2002, the group assumed the name Qa'edat al-Jihad (the base for Jihad). According to Diaa Rashwan (a senior researcher at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies), this was "apparently as a result of the merger of the overseas branch of Egypt's Al-Jihad group, led by Ayman El-Zawahri, with the groups Bin Laden brought under his control after his return to Afghanistan in the mid 1990s." [21]

See also

Notes & references

  1. ^ United States Department of State. "Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs)". Retrieved 2006-07-03. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  2. ^ United Kingdom Home Office. "Proscribed terrorist groups". Retrieved 2006-07-03.
  3. ^ Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada. "Entities list". Retrieved 2006-07-03.
  4. ^ Australian Government. "Listing of Terrorist Organisations". Retrieved 2006-07-03.
  5. ^ "The making of the terror myth". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved October 15. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ Gereges, Fawaz A. (2005). The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Oxford: Cambridge University Press. p. 306. ISBN 0-521-79140-5.
  7. ^ "Pakistan 'catches al-Qaeda chief'". BBC News. 2005-05-04. Retrieved May 29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ "How mobile phones and an £18m bribe trapped 9/11 mastermind". Guardian Unlimited. March 11, 2003. Retrieved May 29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ "Airstrike kills terror leader al-Zarqawi in Iraq". CNN.com. June 8, 2006. Retrieved June 8. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  10. ^ Whitlock, Craig (August 8, 2005). "Briton Used Internet As His Bully Pulpit" (http). WashingtonPost.com. Retrieved May 29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  11. ^ "Babar Ahmad Indicted on Terrorism Charges". United States Attorney's Office District of Connecticut. October 6, 2004. Retrieved May 29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  12. ^ Moazzam Begg's dossier (.pdf) from his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, hosted by Associated Press
  13. ^ "Transcript of Bin Laden's October interview", CNN.com, 5 February 2002. Retrieved 3 September 2006.
  14. ^ "Relevant excerpt from the series", The Power of Nightmares
  15. ^ ""WMD Terrorism and Usama bin Laden" by The Center for Nonproliferation Studies", The Power of Nightmares
  16. ^ "The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means", Guardian Unlimited, 8 July 2005. Retrieved 29 May 2006.
  17. ^ Interview: Dr. Saad Al-Fagih, Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved 14 May 2006.
  18. ^ Interview: Dr. Saad Al-Fagih, Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved 14 May 2006.
  19. ^ "More on Al Qaeda — the database", Wayne Madsen Report, 18 November 2005
  20. ^ "Al Qaeda — The Database", Wayne Madsen Report, 18 November 2005. Retrieved 3 September 2006.
  21. ^ "After Mombassa", Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 2-8 January 2003 (Issue No. 619). Retrieved 3 September 2006.

Further reading

  • Dr Jermey Reynalds [2]
  • Burke, Jason (2004). Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. I. B. Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-396-8.
  • Corbin, Jane (2003). Al-Qaeda: In Search of the Terror Network that Threatens the World. Nation Books. ISBN 1-56025-523-4.
  • Kepel, Gilles (2004). Jihad. The Trail of Political Islam. I. B. Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-722-X.

Videos

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